SCOTT REDFORD AT THE IMA
What an odd idea it seemed for Robert Leonard to want to restage Scott Redford’s mid-nineties work. At a time when people flocked to Brisbane to inspect the new Gallery of Modern Art, the day after the big opening we were offered the chance to come to the Institute of Modern Art (IMA) to consider an exhibition that was located around two themes strongly associated with the nineties; queer identity politics and the life (and death) of grunge rocker Kurt Cobain. Redford has left most of this work out of previous surveys of his career, so seeing it together offered a reflection on an era that does not seem so long ago yet, art historically, feels very different from the one we are now in. The show was interesting firstly because the decision to look back at such a recent and particular history feels awkwardly correct, and secondly because the work proved to be much more than a reliance on what Mike Kelley calls the ‘contemporary intellectual fashion’ of an era. A lot of the work I knew from Redford’s book Guy on the Dunes which was published by the IMA in 1997. Here the work is viewed afresh due perhaps to Robert Leonard’s relatively outside perspective on Redford’s work, Leonard having arrived from New Zealand in 2005 to take up the IMA director’s chair. A decade of distance also provided an aspect of nostalgia that would not have been present in the works’ original outings.
The show was ‘Bricks are Heavy’ and began with a stencil in the front room explaining that the walls were painted with paint mixed with AZT, Prozac, speed and soluble aspirin. The viewer was... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline